The Icelandic/German conspiracy thriller “Operation Napoleon” would be as comforting as its airport thriller plot if it weren’t also baggy, joyless, and spiritually depleting. Based on a novel by best-selling author Arnaldur Indridason (Jar City, Reykjavik Nights), “Operation Napoleon” has everything that your dad probably loves about late-period Clive Cussler and mid-period Robert Ludlum yarns, including evil CIA agents, dramatically inert monologues about hidden treasure, and a crack team of misfits who are being stalked by a ballcap-wearing professional assassin. The plot congeals soon after a group of Icelandic explorers discovers a German WWII spy plane. They’re then attacked by a mysterious group of Americans led by a smiling murderer with a pencil. This scenario doesn’t develop further, but the Americans do chase around the sister of the Icelandic team’s leader. Two hours later, a cliffhanger ending stops “Operation Napoleon” before the movie starts.

To be fair, the makers of this pulpy, if too dry, action-adventure seem to know what they’re doing, or at least where to stick jokes, character development, and perfunctory bloodletting. They also seem to have very literally translated a novel to a visual medium without consideration for how listless, flat, and charmless this globe-trotting chase movie might now look. Case in point: when we first meet Kristin (Vivian Olafsdottir), she’s meticulously dressing down Runolfur (Hjortur Johann Jonsson), a lazy mansplaining colleague, using Powerpoint-style slides that reveal exactly how Runolfur’s tried to sell “old wine in new bottles,” according to Kristin.

We also see Kristin sharing a pseudo-playful conversation with her explorer brother Elias (Atli Oskar Fjalarsson) right before he and his team are approached by smiling Julie Ratoff (Adesuwa Oni) and her armed goons. Elias hastily texts Kristin some video footage of the Nazi plane that he and his hapless companions have stumbled upon. Kristin must soon also deal with Julie, who kills one of Elias’ friends with a pencil and then, in a later scene, tortures someone else with a pencil.

Elias and Kristin’s pre-Julie conversation checks off some dramatic boxes, but in such basic ways that you can’t help but wish that the screenwriters had either rewritten or tried a new approach to this establishing scene. They kid around with each other and talk about their stillborn love lives as if they were distractedly working their way through a checklist of social prompts. Then Julie shows up, and her smile is as unconvincing as Oni’s performance. She asks for Elias and his team’s contact information, and the tension is so hilariously slack that the by-the-numbers bloodletting that follows seems even more underwhelming.

Julie works for the icy CIA agent William Carr (Iain Glen), whom we know is a bad man since, in his first scene, he plays with his grandchildren. William also employs Simon (Wotan Wilke Mohring), a sneaky but laughably conspicuous killer who follows Kristin around Iceland but somehow fails to kill her, and Steve (Jack Fox), her well-read will-they/won’t-they companion. Simon kills and/or roughs up some bystanders, but most of his character-defining aggression, like Julie’s pencil trick, happens off-screen.

Meanwhile, Kristin and Steve learn more about the plane Elias and his friends stumbled upon. Eventually, gentle giant Einar (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) joins Steve and Kristin and shares crucial information about Operation Napoleon. There are no flashbacks to illustrate Einar’s speech, but there’s some stock footage of the Nazis in a later scene.

The primary audience for “Operation Napoleon” seems to be people who either already know and love Indridason’s novel or can’t resist this sort of hardtack potboiler. Most scenes are paced without much grace or rhythm, many visual compositions appear functional and grey, and the cast often looks like they were given one take and then rushed to the next camera set-up. Dialogue doesn’t build so much as it indicates action that may or may not be on-screen. And in many scenes, Kristin and the gang retrace their steps, presumably to ingratiate themselves to viewers trying to follow their deductive logic and pseudo-historical mythology more than whatever they’re looking at. 

If there must be a sequel, as an anticlimactic finale suggests, perhaps its creators will slow down, maybe take a few extra drafts to polish their jokes, or, better yet, a few extra rehearsals to determine what only reads well on paper. Maybe they could give Julie better material to work with than a yellow pencil and a tedious post-Tarantino speech about dog-like foxes. Or maybe Einar could tell a joke at his expense—he’s such a slob!—that took more time to write than recite. Maybe Kristin and Steve can kiss or look at something interesting while they exposit about Operation Napoleon, like some Icelandic glaciers. Indridason could also come on camera and read directly from his book. Who knows, maybe it’ll make time move faster.

On Demand now.

A full house screamed throughout last night’s Times Square premiere of “Jailer,” a grisly and comedic action Indian thriller starring Rajinikanth, the marquee-topping, Tamil-speaking septuagenarian and self-advertised “Super Star.” Or at least, everybody alive in that auditorium seemed to be cheering for Rajinikanth.

Rajinikanth (“Robot,” “Kaala”) is now 72 years old. His “Jailer” character, a retired cop and prison warden named Muthu “Tiger” Pandian, has a sassy young grandson and a knack for murdering villains. Beheadings and fatal stabbings are a Muthu specialty. He also has a vast network of shady old friends, played by a deep bench of Indian character actors and fellow leading men, who also help Muthu to kill the bad men who threaten his family.

In “Jailer,” the bad men are led by Varman (Vinayakan), a manic crime boss who kidnaps Muthu’s adult son Arjun (Vasanth Ravi), also a cop, and threatens to behead Arjun’s grandson Rithvik (Rithvik Jothi Raj), an aspiring YouTube star, while Rithvik and Muthu get ice cream. Varman’s men taunt Muthu by doing a grotesque dance of joy in the street. He retaliates by hacking at some of them with a gigantic blade: “After a point I don’t talk, I slash.” If you come to “Jailer” for anything but Rajinikinath, you will probably leave disappointed.

“Jailer” simultaneously is and isn’t a typical Rajinikanth vehicle. It’s more self-conscious and more committed than some of his other recent vehicles, as far as reconciling the tonal whiplash banked into the Indian cinema’s kitchen sink, mass-audience-minded masala style. The makers of “Jailer” toggle between emotional registers with confidence and alarming frequency, like whenever Muthu helps Rithvik film a gardening program for his YouTube channel, and then resumes his bloody feud with Varman. In a musical montage that only makes sense after a long-delayed plot twist, Muthu and Rithvik bask in each other’s company while an acoustic guitar plays and a singer paints a sunny picture of a man who, in Rithvik, also sees “my leader … my son.” Meanwhile, Arjun tortures one of Varman’s men, and also orders a fellow cop to not give water to his blood-soaked victim. The acoustic guitarist never takes a break.

The persistent extremity of Varman’s character-defining violence also gives old man Rajinikanth a mandate to be merciless. It’s sometimes even touching to see him match Varman since, as our antihero’s theme song boasts, “He will make your next generation dance to his tunes.” Rajinikanth is perhaps unusual when compared to, say, a Sylvester Stallone or a Steven Seagal, in that he still attracts the sort of young idolatrous filmmakers who all seem obsessed with making the now biologically mature star look eternally iconic. A friend who saw “Jailer” in Los Angeles last night joked about how many times Rajinikanth enters a new room with dramatic flair. In Times Square, each new slow-motion turn to the camera was met with screams. So were Rajinikanth’s lusty action scenes, especially when he finally notices Varman’s barrels of sulphuric acid.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell if director Nelson Dilipkumar knows what he’s doing, either with his star or this movie’s volatile mix of tones and styles. “Beast,” Dilipkumar’s loopy third-generation “Die Hard” clone, gives some helpful context since “Beast” pits the relatively young four-quadrant star Vijay against a shopping mall full of terrorists, one of whom he also beheads. In “Jailer,” Muthu is an older man with a legacy to consider. On-screen, Rajinikanth occasionally bumps his head against his emotional range’s low ceiling, like when Muthu cries about Arjun’s fate. In this scene, Rajinikanth leans as hard into his angles as he does whenever Muthu loses it and cackles like a lunatic with a secret.

Before an “INTERMISSION” intertitle flashed across the screen—they never pause for intermission at the AMC Empire 25—Muthu tells us that now that he’s got nothing to lose, he can stop juggling three different faces and just wear one. He says this to his family members after he warns them to stay perfectly still, so that he and his action-pose-ready friends can pick off some more bad men. After the “INTERMISSION” title, there’s an extensive new subplot involving an extra-marital affair, a bad toupee, the comedian Sunil, and the starlet Tamannaah Bhatia. Everybody acts as a version of themselves in “Jailer,” but only Rajinikanth’s performance pulls everything together by sheer willpower.

Rajinikanth is 72 years old, so it’s weirdly moving to see that, every two or three years, he can still crank out a freewheeling star vehicle as vigorous and exhausting as “Jailer.” Just outside theater 25, I overheard a 40-something year old man ask an older companion what he thought about “Jailer.” I couldn’t make out the older fellow’s response, but his chuckle and little shake of the head suggested that he was still enjoying Rajinikanth’s eternal summer.

In theaters now.